Many times since, I’ve thought of that bottle. Once I even considered donning scuba gear to salvage it, so that I could ship it to Livy as a gift. (I’m pretty sure I conceived this madness on the night I heard she was getting married.) I’m not much for symbolism, but that unopened bottle of red wine fills the bill if ever anything did. Inside it is a road unwalked, a life unlived. And today, I suspect, Livy means to find it. An impossible task, probably. But impossible is a word she never paid much attention to. Her attitude is simple: where Livy Marston goes, the rules do not apply.

“Stop!” she cries. “I think you passed it.”

I hit the brakes, skid a few yards through the gravel, then back up until Livy says stop. An autumnal sadness suffuses me when I see the overgrown track, a desolate path through the trees that none would take but a killer looking for a place to dump his victim.

“Pull in,” orders Livy.

I nose the Spyder into the trees, and she climbs out without opening the door and starts through the waist-high weeds. I put up the top of the convertible as quickly as I can and follow.

Five minutes’ hard walking brings us to the edge of the swamp. The old pumping unit is still here, its great black arm frozen in place like a broken limb, the oil-bearing sands beneath the swamp long since depleted. The smell of stale crude permeates the air, and the cypress trees have no tops, casualties of salt water leaking from the well. The swamp itself is a scummy greenish-brown, swarming with breeding mosquitoes and obscured by a head-high wall of swamp grass. Our enchanted pool is gone.

“Well,” I say philosophically. “I guess it’s true.”

“What?”

“You can’t go home again.”

Livy stares at the mess as though willing it back to its former beauty. I stand mute, waiting for her to face reality. But she won’t. Why should she? Reality never stopped her before. She strips off her shirt and jeans, revealing a white one-piece bathing suit underneath. Then she hops onto a fallen tree that angles off through the hissing grass and walks like a gymnast down the rotting trunk. I call out for her to stop, but she pays no attention.

I have little choice but to follow.

When I get to the end of the trunk, I find myself stranded in a snaky morass with Livy nowhere in sight.

“Penn?” she calls from a jungle of foliage to my left. “Come here.”

“Where are you?”

“There’s a stump just below the surface of the water. That will take you to the next trunk.”